Q+A With Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Bravo's Work of Art

This week’s episode of Work of Art featured an emotional farewell to one contestant—even China Chow shed a few tears. Though she was in Europe during the episode’s filming, Work of Art judge Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn took a break to talk with GQ about her unique art collection, her philosophy about "looking at art out loud," and why it was okay for Miles to recreate artwork for the competition.

Jeanne is a gallerist, art advisor, independent curator, and collector. She is founder of Salon94 as well as Salon94 Freemans, and is working on a new space, Salon94 Bowery, that will open in late October near the New Museum in New York City.

Your father was an art dealer and your mother wrote childrens books about art. That must have been a wonderful environment to grow up in.

They are also both art collectors so I grew up surrounded by the art of their generation, which was Warhol and Lichtenstein, pop artists, and minimalist artists like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. And it was a very different time because artists really did make treks across the country to show their work in different galleries. So most artists had a New York gallery, a Midwest gallery and a LA gallery.

And now it’s different because it’s more New York-based?

Now it’s different because art is so accessible via magazines, the Internet, and art fairs that the collector now takes a pilgrimage to see the art versus of the other way around. And also most of these cities now have very vital museum programs for contemporary art whereas that didn’t exist before.

Is it difficult for you to separate your personal love for art pieces and certain artists from your expertise for understanding the market and what is in high demand?

That’s a great question. I’m very attracted to things on a personal level, which might never have any kind of market reaction. That’s where I enjoy art very privately. But I am deeply interested in the market and zeitgeist art. I am interested in artists who create iconic images. I am interested in market-driven art as well, what kind of a group of people are all reacting to. Because there is usually some kind of a social or philosophical reasoning behind it. And so I always look at art in both of those ways. In fact, when you brought up the game that my father used to play with me, we used to say "what work of art would you take home and what work of art would you sell?" And sometimes those would be the same work of art and sometimes they would be very different. So it’s an ercise that I do on a daily level.

So you do make a distinction for yourself?

Oh yes, and I assume that most of the art that I bring home is not what most people would want to live with.

Do you remember a moment or a specific art piece that made you realize your love for art was serious and that you had developed a unique and distinctive palette for appreciating work?

There was definitely a slow burn, but my father and I took a trip to Europe when I was probably in 6th or 7th grade and we first went to the Basel Art Fair and [a gallerist] took us into his storage. To the right of his desk was a small Cezanne bathers painting and that just completely seduced me. And that painting is a painting I still go back to see.

What is a traditional salon and why do you think it is an important way to view artwork?

First, the tradition of the Salon always interested me. I approached the Salon really from the vantage point of a European salon like Gertrude Stein or of Florine Stettheimer in New York, where there’s a sense of community and a sense of performance and dialogue. So that you don’t enter a silent space when looking at art, you enter space where there is going to be an organized dialogue, or a space where a dialogue can be easily generated. Usually it can either be because you have set something up — an organized symposium or an artist discussion or a performance — or that you have gathered a group of people in an environment where dialogue going to take place. And I grew up around art in a domestic environment and that was my comfort zone I never wanted to leave it. So that’s why I built Salon 94 uptown.

Can you describe your philosophy about viewing artwork in a furnished domestic environment?

Looking at art is both a very private experience and a public experience. There are different ways of looking at art. In fact, the Bravo show... has been fun for all of the judges, because usually you’re looking at art alone, but here you’re looking at it out loud. And I’ve always been attracted that social dialogue.

And I do think that art right now is very participatory. If you look at the way museums are constructing exhibitions right now, with all of the performances happening. If you look at PERFORMA with its success. The public is very hungry for a participatory experience and the social aspect of art is definitely changing... I think that art [in 2010] is going to be very much defined by that — it’s very event driven now.

There was a bit of controversy regarding the artwork that Miles made, because he recreated a piece that he had already made before.

I say go for it. That was one of my criticisms with Nao, and people were very upset when we kicked Nao off and my point was, her history is performance art. Instead of going backward into her history and into her resources as a performance artist, she created something entirely new, which was a total failure. And my feeling was, why not go back and refine something that she’s already worked on and show us something spectacular... And that’s probably where she failed the most... Sometimes you can’t do too much experimenting in this kind of public format. You have to use your strengths.

What aspects of the art world are accurately depicted on Work of Art?

I think the show does two things. The show is a very good simulation of the art-making process and that practice. But it also shows people different ways they can look at art. So it’s also teaching in kind of a backhanded way about looking at art. When somebody is looking at the show, they are judging alongside [the judges]. We are including them in the dialogue and they are either agreeing with it or disagreeing with it and so they are kind of implicated in the judging of the art and by that they are learning how to look at art.

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